This Ruined Place

By Michael Lawrence

People lived here once.

Raised families.

Worked the land.

Knew joy and sorrow.

No more. Not now.

There's nothing now.

No people.

No joy or sorrow.

Just ruins.

And memories.

Alternative memories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 8N Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987977422

Michael Lawrence

Michael Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University; MDiv, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as the lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.

Book preview

1

It’s August, another dazzling August, and if I half close my eyes it’s as if no time has passed, no time at all. It has, of course. Can’t deny it for long. I’m Evy Cobb these years, a different person in so many ways, with a different name, different values, different hair even – and two fast-growing sons. I’ve told my boys about this place, told them often, but they’re young, they never pay much attention. Someone else’s life, a little bit of Mom’s past, let her get on with it. They seem a bit more interested now that they’re here, though, which pleases me. I encourage them and their dad to wander off, explore, experience as much as the authorities allow. I’ll meet them back at the car in an hour, I tell them, but not to rush for the sake of it. An hour should be enough for me to do my own wandering. My more specific wandering. For my mind to fill up once again with all that happened here the last August of the old century, twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one almost to the day.

She was Midge then. Midge Miller, sixteen, and she hadn’t laughed for a week. But even she couldn’t help a tiny chirrup at the sight from her window. Across the road, a prehistoric car had just pulled up outside the inn or hotel or whatever it was, and the old boy struggling to get out of it, straightening up, revealed himself to be one of the tallest men she’d ever seen, which made his car seem one of the smallest.

‘Juby!’

She jumped – hadn’t heard the floorboards – but before she could turn, Inger was crouching at her shoulder, also peering out.

‘I was beginning to wonder if he was going to give this year a miss. He’s usually here before the second week. Must be slowing up at last. Or do I mean down, I can never remember.’

‘You know him?’ Midge asked.

‘Oh, yes. Indeed. He and Edwin were boys together. Juby comes over from Sweden every August to prowl around their childhood haunts.’

‘Sweden? He lives in Sweden? Isn’t that your neck of the woods?’

Inger laughed. ‘Not quite the neck. The general geographic proximity, you might say.’

‘If he’s such an old friend why doesn’t he stay here? You have another guest room.’

‘Stay here? Oh no. Him and Edwin. Tuh! The tension when they’re together, you could cut it with scissors.’

They watched the incredibly tall man lean into the car for the jacket that matched his sagging black trousers. As he attempted to put the jacket on, all arms and elbows that seemed uncertain which way to go, Inger rose from her crouch.

‘What I came up for,’ she said, ‘was to ask if you’re helping in the shop again today.’

Midge stiffened. Thumb and fingertips of one hand on the window glass. Five tense digits. The other five a claw at her side. It was like being at home. You always had to be doing something. Couldn’t just sit at a window minding your own business, oh no. Criminal offence, looking out of a fucking window.

‘If you like.’

‘It’s not compulsory,’ Inger said with a very slight edge.

Midge let her hand fall from the glass; tried to sound less fed up.

‘No. Really. I don’t mind.’

‘When you’re ready then. No rush.’

Then she was alone again, watching the ungainly old man negotiate the doorway of The Ferryman. To pass through the entrance – low even for people of normal height – he had to drop his head to shoulder level, but as his shoulders were higher than the top of most men’s heads he still managed to crack his skull. Again she laughed. Whoa, two laughs in two minutes. A laugh a minute, have to watch that, people might think that being abandoned by your parents is fun.

Her parents. Her fists involuntarily clenched at the thought of them. Mostly they shuffled papers at the Earthsave International offices near home in Winchester, but every so often some Big Threat to humanity would crop up somewhere in the world and they’d be off with a boatload of other heroes to try to prevent it, frustrate it, aggravate its perpetrators. This time it was some lunatic dictatorship (the Inanians, her dad called them) testing their latest weapon of mass destruction in the South Pacific. The long-promised trip to Orlando had been scrapped and they’d cast about for somewhere to deposit her. Usually when they went on these missions she was left with Nessa and her folks, but the Friedmans had gone away a couple of days before the Inanian thing came up, which reduced the alternatives to one.

Here. A room above a bookshop in South Dorset. Her grandparents’.

She hadn’t been here often over the eight years she’d been forced to live in this country. Didn’t know them very well really. But eight years! Damn near a hundred months, almost four hundred weeks, never mind the hours, the minutes. An eternity. She didn’t fit here. She wasn’t of this piddling little country. She longed, just longed, to be back in Michigan, where the girls she’d grown up with still lived, still laughed, had good times, and the rest.

It was her mother’s fault. Her fault for being English, getting homesick, bringing them to the dismal little land of her birth so that so she could be happy again. Never mind the daughter’s happiness. The years in which she, Midge, had to not only live here but learn to sound like she belonged here so that ears wouldn’t prick up whenever she spoke and people ask what the hell kind of accent that was and where the hell she came from.

She turned from the window, into the gloomy little cell she’d been sentenced to for she didn’t know how long. They’d made it plain, her parents, that they thought more of the welfare of others than of hers. Didn’t they realize how screwed up that was? How it screwed her up, knowing that their efforts to protect the planet were the real reason her school work was suffering? She’d tried telling them, but she always came badly out of such confrontations. Compared with their ‘humanitarian objectives’, her pitiful attempts to present her case made her sound like a self-centered brat.

‘If no-one reacted against such things, Midge,’ her mother had said, ‘the world would be right up shit creek.’

‘It is up shit creek, you’re always saying.’

‘Yeah, but someone has to try to make things better.’

‘Well, why can’t it be someone else?’

‘If we all said that, darling, nothing would ever improve.’

The end result of which was that she ‘must be strong’; look beyond her ‘own domestic preferences’: arguments she had no option but to submit to.

She dashed an arm across her eyes and allowed them a watery inspection of the room. What a hovel. No carpet, just a big square rug on bare brown boards: a thin faded thing with unraveling ends that she longed to tug till there was nothing left. Ornaments included an ancient jug-and-bowl set (bowl cracked, jug the last resting place of a dead spider), a pair of dusty china dogs, fragments of rock on every flat surface, a wooden chess set with a piece missing. On the walls, in thin black frames, there were a couple dozen old photos that held no interest whatsoever. The pictures were wonky, all of them, and wonky they would stay. Nothing to do with her.

Then there was the mirror: a full-length mahogany chevalier which seemed to catch her reflection wherever she went about the room, like it was watching her. It was her general practice to avoid mirrors as much as she could. The sly peek before going out was rarely more than that; just a glance to make sure there was no sleep in her eyes, food lodged between her teeth, that her hair was reasonably tidy, and so on. Mirrors were a curse. They revealed what everyone saw when they looked at her: gawky frame, too-wide shoulders, big nose, patchy complexion prone to spottiness, hair like tangled rope if she didn’t wash it daily. If she didn’t look quite as bad in the chevalier it wasn’t because its old specked glass possessed some special quality or power, it was merely that it reflected a different arrangement of light and shade than more familiar rooms. Maybe the girl in the mirror is the real Midge, she thought. The Midge in the mirror smiled. Clearly she’d been thinking that too.

Then they both turned, one to the left, one to the right, and went out to their separate landings, where at least one smile quickly faded. Midge couldn’t speak for the real her in the mirror, but her day did not look promising. She might have viewed it with more optimism – or at least more interest – if she’d known that it would be a day that would reshape her life. Set the wheels in motion anyway.

And all without mirrors.

2

Her grandparents, Inger Bjølstad and Edwin Rainey, had been together, unmarried, for over forty years. Inger saw no point in marriage and insisted on her surname being used on all documents and communications. ‘We’re two separate people,’ she said, ‘two single people, and we’ll be treated as such.’ Almost every adult who knew them on anything approaching a personal basis called them by their first names. So did Midge, but only in her head. She’d known them all her life, yet felt that she knew them hardly at all. Visits to them or by them had never been frequent, so until now, this week, she’d spent little time alone in their company. Without her parents there they made her nervous, especially Inger, who could be quite spiky when crossed. Midge had witnessed her anger with Edwin a couple of times and hoped she herself would never be on the receiving end of it. She loved the way her grandmother spoke, however. Her accent was slight, her English more precise than most English people’s, but every now and then she would put a Scandinavian spin on a word that suddenly made her seem like the most colorful person around. Which she probably was anyway in a hole like Underthorpe.

Inger was removing the old display from the shop window to make way for a new one while Midge went from shelf to shelf putting newly-delivered titles in alphabetical order. She was helping out because she felt obliged to. A way of earning the keep she didn’t want. She could think of any number of things she’d rather be doing. No. Correction. She couldn’t think of one, here.

‘Midge, we have a visitor!’

The shop door sprang back and the hyperactive brass bell drowned out the thud of forehead smacking lintel. The incredibly tall man’s knees folded and he staggered in clutching his head, one leg trying to walk away from him. If he’d been a character in a comic he would have had a halo of stars whizzing round his head. Inger jumped back from the window and threw a chair under the graceless giant just in time to stop him crashing to the floor.

‘Juby Bench, how many years have I had this shop?’

He groaned. ‘Please, not a quiz, spare me, woman.’

‘And how many times have you banged your head on that door?’

‘Can’t remember, it’s all that banging me head on the bleedin’ door.’

He removed his hand from his forehead and looked at it. There was nothing in it, but on his brow there was a reversed OU where it had rushed at the embossed MIND YOUR HEAD above the door.

‘Bloody country. Everything’s so low here.’

‘Sit quiet a moment,’ Inger commanded.

‘I thought I was.’ He scowled about him. The shop interior must have seemed very dull after the brilliant light outside. He peered Midge’s way through the comparative gloom. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Midge,’ Inger said. ‘She’s staying with us for a while.’

‘Midge?’

‘Midge Miller, my granddaughter from Winchester. Midge, come and meet Mr. Bench.’

‘Juby,’ the old man said. ‘Just Juby.’

As she approached he raised his rump two inches off the chair and extended a startlingly long arm. The wrist on the end of the startlingly long arm was like a dog’s favorite bone, while the palm that swamped hers was as smooth as a piece of worn old leather that’s been left out in the sun. The knobbly fingers closed lightly but firmly, jerked her hand up and down twice, and withdrew. Then Juby Bench sat back and studied her.

‘Does she look like your girl?’ he asked.

‘She has her height,’ Inger said. ‘And Kristin’s eyes, I think. Not her nose, though. That’s all her own.’

‘Don’t talk to me about noses,’ Juby Bench said.

Inger laughed. So did he. Obviously an old joke between them. His nose wasn’t one you could ignore. Midge had always been self-conscious about her own nose, but hers was positively petite beside his great beak. His eyes had not left her. Very pale gray eyes. Unnerving, the way they examined her.

‘Midge, was it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Like the insect?’

‘Lost none of your charm over the past year, I see,’ Inger said to him.

He ignored this. ‘Why would anyone call their daughter Midge?’

‘It’s a nickname.’ Inger again.

‘Nickname?’

‘She was a very small toddler.’

‘She’s not a toddler now, or small. What’s your given name?’ he asked Midge.

‘Evy,’ said Inger.

He flashed her an annoyed glance. ‘Doesn’t the girl have a tongue?’

‘You’re making her uncomfortable, can’t you see?’

‘Me? Making her uncomfortable?’ To Midge: ‘I’m not, am I?’

He was, but she wasn’t going to admit it. ‘No.’

‘Midge,’ he murmured, turning the name over in his mouth like a boiled sweet he wasn’t sure about. He shook his head. ‘Nah. Doesn’t fit. Not the young lady I see before me. I’ll call you Evy. Much better.’

‘She might not want you to call her Evy,’ Inger said.

The exceedingly pale eyes drilled a silent question into Midge’s own. She shrugged off-handedly. She didn’t care what he called her; just wished he’d stop looking at her that way.

‘How’s the head?’ Inger asked their visitor, tactfully obliging him to release her granddaughter from his gimlet gaze.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ he replied. ‘If it belonged to someone else.’

Midge escaped to her shelves while she had the chance. From there, watching the pair of them between and around books, she saw Inger reach out and touch the old man’s cheek, a cheek of white bristles, very delicately, like someone attempting Braille for the first time.

‘Why so late this year, old fella?’ Almost a whisper.

‘Less of the old,’ he said.

‘You’re usually here before now.’

‘I’ve been a bit…’

‘A bit what?’

‘Under the weather.’

‘Oh, nothing serious, I hope.’

‘If it was, you think I’d tell you? You’d send me straight to bed with a thermometer and a bunch of grapes.’

‘But you’re staying to the end of the month?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘You’re not usually so vague either.’

Juby Bench gripped his knees to ease himself upward. His joints creaked as he rose. On his feet, he was forced to stoop in the low room, the ceiling flattening his unruly shock of wiry gray hair. He settled his jaw on one shoulder and his lips moved as though preparing to pass words, but then clamped shut. His eyes cut across to Midge, who tried to look engrossed in her work. He wants to tell Gran something, she thought, something personal, but he can’t with me here.

It wasn’t that. It was nothing like that. But it would be several days before she discovered what was on Juby Bench’s mind, and then she would be sworn to secrecy, unable to share it with anyone. Anyone at all.

3

It was perhaps a slight overstatement to say that Midge hadn’t smiled for a week. There’d been the odd reluctant smirk; always her grandfather’s doing. Edwin Rainey had a way of making a joke of things that even Midge, determined to appear displeased when eyes were upon her, found hard to resist. He was especially entertaining when taking off Inger in one of her outbursts at the posturings of some ‘idiot politician’ on the radio or some foolish enquiry in the shop. When Inger was at her most agitated Edwin would stand behind her mimicking her outrageously, flapping his arms, juggling his eyebrows, and when she whirled round suspecting something of the